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WHAT. THE. SNOWCLONE. METAFILTER?

This is a collection of references to and permutations on an old Metafilter injoke that displays snowclonish flexibility in its deployment.

The following focuses almost exclusively on its use in Metatalk, and depends on a pattern-matching technique that is imperfect, so there are definitely a number of instantiations of the template that I have not covered. Feel free to point out any interesting ones in the comments.

My search method: a SQL “LIKE” statement to filter for metatalk comments containing either the string “what” or the string “what.” at the end of a line in a comment, case-insensitive. This finds some false positives (“so what.”, dumbfounded solo “what”) but those are fairly easy to disregard by eyeballing the results for the classic four-ish line form.

Genesis of the WTFM meme

August 1st, 2002: Irontom calls out mathowie in Metatalk, and punctuates his concern with this construction:

WHAT.
THE.
FUCK.
MATT?

The phrase gets discussed a bit in thread, and catches on as (generally) a joke, showing up a lot in Metatalk in the next bit, either repeated verbatim or modified in one of a number of ways. I’ve organized citations roughly by type of modification.

– My search was based on a search for isolated “WHAT”s, so finding this was just luck. There may be other instances of non-WHAT X for “X THE FUCK MATT”, but I will have to come up with a sane method for locating them.

Some of the citations deviate from the form of the original in specific curious ways or come off as ambiguous with respect to the original form.

General notes on format: the original was in all caps with terminal punctuation after each line, single-spaced, with periods for the first three words and a question mark for the final word. A variant without terminal punctuation on the initial three (or so) words cropped up not long after the meme first took off, and accounts for about half of the citations, with a somewhat greater proportion of the later citations.

– Parodic over-punctuation, including transliteration of numeric interpretation of failure-to-hold-shift-while-pounding-“!” string of adjascent “1” characters. This is a whole side discussion, one that would hopefully take a look at the plausibility of an actual angry person generating the order of keystrokes presented in parody. Alternating ? and ! characters? Really? Etc.